Stop Twitter Spam

The founder of Twitter Blacklist has closed down the Twitter Blacklist site. In fact, he has completely given up on Twitter and has accepted a job working on Laconica, which is the open source software that powers Twitter-clone Identi.ca. Here is the full text of his goodbye message:

As of July 12th 2008, this service will no longer be available.

Dear friends, fans, and foes,

Of late I’ve lost confidence in Twitter as a platform. Their uptime is risible; their community interaction questionable. (Think failure to enforce their own TOS – “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users”? Forget it.) I don’t think Twitter’s going to get any better; in fact, I think it’s all downhill from here on out.

Luckily there’s now an alternative. Check out Identi.ca. It’s open source and open data. If spam becomes an issue – and let’s face it, it will – the community will be the ones who work out how to deal with it, and it’ll happen – fast. That’s a guarantee we don’t have with Twitter.

I’m confident that Identi.ca, and Laconica, the software that powers it, are the right route to take into the future. (Full disclosure: confident enough, in fact, to have accepted a job working on the project.) For that reason, I won’t be running the Twitter Blacklist any more, and will be shutting down the API.

Thanks very much for all the support and interest you’ve shown for the duration of this experiment, and I hope that you’ll consider moving on from Twitter to a sustainable alternative.

— Earle

In case anyone is wondering, I am sticking with Twitter and still think there is a bright future for them. I welcome new services like Identi.ca because I think they will push Twitter to make their service better. But my community is still on Twitter and I believe in the team that Twitter has assembled.